The Coronavirus is upending life as we know it. Fast and effective communication across teams matters now more than ever. At Speakap, our goal remains unchanged: to help you reach your employees wherever they are.

More than 450 companies trust us to communicate in live-time with their entire workforce. To meet the needs of these unprecedented circumstances, we’re enhancing our services. You can now get your communication platform up and running within 24 hours; quickly and hassle-free.

Ok, so an update to our legal settings might not have you all hot under the collar, but take this blog post to your legal and compliance teams and we guarantee you’re going to make their day - and Speakap will become their new favorite ESN.

To give us the lowdown on this latest small but mighty update, we caught up with Speakap product manager Tom Kleijn.

For the less legally-inclined among us, can you explain this update?

Previously, when a new end-user first logged in to Speakap, they’d see our own Speakap terms and conditions. But, in reality, these terms and conditions are between the company and their employees - not the company and Speakap. So, this update allows our customers to create their own terms and conditions between the organization and their employees who use Speakap.

Why does a company need its own terms and conditions?

There are so many variables now. Each country may require specific terms, conditions or notices, such as an impressum in Germany, for example. But then different organizations have different requirements, so we wanted to empower our customers to define and communicate what end-users can and can’t do on Speakap and how they use their data.

And what does this feature look like in Speakap?

If the admin goes to ‘Network settings’ in Speakap, they’ll now see a ‘Legal settings’ option. There are three options that can be customized:

Terms & Conditions: new users need to tick the checkbox for this before first registering, and a prompt can be sent to existing users if T&Cs are updated

Privacy Notice: This doesn’t need to be confirmed by the user, but is always accessible

Legal Notice: This is simply informational

Once updated, end-users are prompted to agree to anything that requires opt-in, and they can access all the documents at any time in the Personal Settings section.

Can this feature be customized?

Yes, of course. You can call them anything you’d like. If you have a user agreement, rules around the use of content, or any other information that requires either employees to opt-in or to be able to access easily, you could just rename the notice to fit.

Also, within the notices themselves, we’ve enabled a rich text editor so customers can hyperlink sections (to an employee handbook, for example) or add bold or italic text. You can’t add images or videos as we didn’t think that a privacy notice was the right place for a Barbie GIF!

When is this feature available to Speakap customers?

It’s already been fully rolled out. Our existing customers should be aware that, if they haven’t set any new terms and conditions, there’s nothing in place now and it does need updating. There’s no placeholder but, if they contact us, we do have some examples they can refer to for inspiration.

Thanks to Tom for making the relatively uninspirational world of legal and privacy notices sound interesting and understandable. Now, send this blog on to your legal team and watch as they rejoice!